Spikes versus Rubber on wood floor?

Nsgarch, even though we "beat a dead horse" for a while, I do appreciate your willingness to offer your expertise. I have learned a lot from many like you here on the 'Gon who have always been eager to help.

And just as an aside, I don't believe "incompetants" is a word. But what do I know since I am not one of the...uh huh...brilliant ones :)

Whether to couple, decouple and dampen, etc., is determined by experiment. Theory does not help because whether any result is positive or negative depends on a wide range of factors. With a suspended wood floor, coupling will mean that the floor will be able to better act as a resonant sounding board itself. That is good, if you want some bass/midbass warmth, and bad if you want to tighten up the bass.

I personally use a Symposium Svelte shelf under my speakers. This thin, multilayer platform is coupled to the whole bottom surface of the speaker enclosure for effective transfer of vibrational energy to the platform. The inner layer then converts that energy to heat. This is an effective way or reducing the shaking of the speaker itself (generally not a good thing for sonics), and dissipates this energy instead of transferring it to the floor. This tightens up the sound noticeably, which is a good thing in my system.

inpepinnovations - stick around here and you'll find out. Otherwise, just buy the cheapest new stereo you can find and enjoy how well it measures.

If the floor seems to be the offending item, I always recommend fixing the problem, instead of adding some other item into the mix to try to mitigate the floor problem.

Nsgarch has some good advice about locating the speakers over the joists, and there can be supports placed under the joists too.

I had speakers with cones and down firing subs sitting on a suspended floor in a relatively new home. The floor has a resonant frequency of 34 hz, and I know because at that frequency the amplitude of the vibrations increases so much it shakes the chair and tickles my butt!

To solve it, I cross braced the joists, put a post under the center of the floor, and put a piece of slate between the cones and the carpet (isolation). This combination works very well indeed, and there is no visible movement of the speaker tops.

So, my experience and that of Fiddler are very similar, in that we both found isolation was necessary on a suspended floor. That does not mean coupling should never be used, as these same speakers on a concrete floor shine with just the cones.